In Lives Other Than My Own, Emmanuel Carrère recounts seeking treatment from the celebrated psychoanalyst François Roustang. Roustang refused to take him as a patient. His reason was devastating in its simplicity: Carrère, he believed, was not interested in getting better. He was interested in tripping up the therapist.
Imagine arriving at the office of a renowned psychoanalyst desperate for relief from some nameless psychic misery, only to be told that your real ambition is to make your therapist look like a fool.
It is a remarkable diagnosis.
Carrère’s impulse, Roustang concluded, was not to surrender to therapy but to convert it into a duel. Every session would become an opportunity to expose the therapist’s blind spots, frustrate his methods, and demonstrate that no one—not even a celebrated analyst—could penetrate his defenses. The goal was not healing but victory.
On the surface, this sounds clever.
In reality, it is the psychology of a frightened child.
The patient who must always outwit the therapist is not displaying superior intelligence. He is displaying superior evasiveness. His greatest fear is not failure but surrender. If he can reduce the therapist to exasperation, then he never has to confront the far more terrifying possibility that someone might actually understand him.
For that reason, Roustang’s refusal seems puzzling.
Surely this was exactly the patient he ought to have accepted.
Instead, he sent him away.
One imagines that Carrère experienced a brief flash of triumph. The contest had ended before it began, and somehow he had won. Another therapist defeated. Another authority figure frustrated. Another confirmation that no one could reach him.
What exquisite misery.
But Roustang had anticipated the move.
His refusal was not surrender. It was strategy.
He later told Carrère that if he was so determined to remain miserable, he had only two honest options: end his life or begin living.
With that brutal simplicity, Roustang shattered the entire game.
There was no argument to refute, no interpretation to ridicule, no therapeutic jargon to dismantle. There remained only a stark moral choice. Continue worshiping misery or abandon it.
Suddenly Carrère’s obstinacy no longer looked rebellious.
It looked juvenile.
The performance he had mistaken for intellectual sophistication was revealed as the defensive posture of an anxious ego terrified of vulnerability. His endless resistance ceased to resemble strength. It resembled Gollum clutching the Ring while congratulating himself on his independence.
Roustang’s words proved bracing rather than cruel. Carrère gradually emerged from his depression and eventually found the strength to write My Life as a Russian Novel, the book that, in his words, pulled him “from the abyss.”
His story clarifies a distinction our culture often blurs: the difference between being childish and being childlike.
The childish person is governed by wounded pride. He is obstinate, theatrical, self-absorbed, forever digging trenches around his private kingdom of resentment. He mistakes defiance for courage and isolation for authenticity. Like Gollum, he clings to the very thing that is poisoning him while insisting it is his greatest treasure.
The childlike person possesses the opposite spirit. He is open rather than defensive, curious rather than suspicious, grateful rather than entitled. He greets the world with wonder instead of grievance. He resembles Adam before the first bite of the apple, when innocence had not yet curdled into self-justification.
Perhaps that is the hidden kinship between therapy and religion.
Neither exists merely to make us feel better.
Both seek to expose the childish ego that mistakes stubbornness for strength and self-protection for freedom. Both ask us to relinquish the exhausting performance of being unconquerable. Both invite us to recover something we once possessed before fear, vanity, and self-deception took root.
The task, in the end, is not to become more sophisticated.
It is to become less like Gollum.
Cinemorphosis 
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